From Packing to Prosperity

Rapidly growing West Fargo builds its own identity

By Nichole Aksamit
The Forum

West Fargo was a meat-packing town before it was even a town.

And long before it became the city of West Fargo, it was a whistle-stop named Haggart, two villages called West Fargo and Southwest Fargo and the cities of West Fargo Industrial Park, Southwest Fargo and Riverside.

Although the city's name and boundaries have evolved greatly throughout the years, its identity as a magnet for industry and suburban living remains intact.

Likewise, the spirit of the hardworking people who built West Fargo's first meat-packing plant, manned its stockyards and started its schools lives on in the city today.

Year of the frogs

The first settler in what is now West Fargo was John Haggart, who homesteaded between Fargo and Mapleton, N.D., in 1871, before North Dakota was even a state.

In 1916, Haggart and fellow farmers formed the Equity Cooperative Packing Co., which opened a meat-packing plant and 24 houses for its workers east of the Sheyenne River and north of Main Avenue in 1919 in what was then known as Haggart, a stop on the Northern Pacific Railroad line.

The plant bought, slaughtered, processed and sold cattle, hogs and sheep and drew workers from Fargo and the surrounding countryside until it went bankrupt in 1922 and sold its properties to Lewis Altenbernd, a farmer from Sabin, Minn.


The plant's closing left most in Haggart with debts, kids in school and little knowledge of other trades. But that summer, after heavy rains, thousands of frogs appeared along the Sheyenne River.

"And it seemed like an act of God, for suddenly there were frogs and frog buyers," remembered one resident in "Thru the Years to '76," a history of West Fargo and Riverside.

Frog legs, considered a delicacy in many places, fetched a high price and, it is said, residents would withstand the croaking of hundreds of frogs in their basements until they could find a buyer.

The Armour era

The frog market provided enough money to keep Haggart alive until Armour & Co. bought the Equity plant and village site from Altenbernd in 1925 and changed its name to the village of West Fargo.

The homes just north of Main Avenue in this 1936 photo were dubbed "the Armour houses." Built by the Equity Cooperative Packing Co., in 1919, they acquired the nickname from the plant that owned them and the workers who rented them from 1925 to 1959. Forum file photo

"It was a larger plant than Federal Beef has now," remembers J.M. Dahle, 92, of West Fargo, who worked in the pork-cutting department and livestock killing floor for Armour from 1930 to 1959.

Armour dumped plant sewage into the Sheyenne River until the late 1930s, when lawsuits filed by farmers living downstream forced the plant to build a sewage disposal facility.

Although just 37 men worked at the plant when it opened, by 1935 as many as 750 people were working during peak production.

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'Gamblin Sam' one of West Fargo's colorful characters

By Nichole Aksamit
The Forum

The first known murder in West Fargo involved "Gamblin' Sam" Azadian and his brother Mike, Armenian immigrants who came to the area to work on the railroad in the 1920s.

Written accounts indicate the brothers lived contentedly in the West Fargo Hotel near the railroad tracks until one day in about 1925 when Sam reported Mike missing.

After an extensive search for the missing man, Mike's body was found in the Sheyenne River.

He appeared to have been robbed, stabbed and tossed from the railroad bridge. His assailant was never found.

It is said that Sam sunk into a depression for quite some time and, after extensive mourning, emerged a man to be reckoned with.

"Of the few hundred people living in West Fargo in the early '30s, Sam Azadian was the only real character," writes Calvin McCamy, who first met Sam in 1930.

As McCamy tells it in "Thru the Years to '76," Friday was payday at the Armour plant, where most of Sam's gambling buddies worked.

So every Friday, Sam would collect his paycheck at the railroad, haul "a couple of peck sacks of assorted bottles of hard booze" up to his room in the hotel, buy a few new packs of Bicycle playing cards and wait for the boys to show up.

The regulars came first, followed by stragglers from the saloons across the border, since liquor was prohibited in North Dakota.

"By the time Sam had separated them all from their livelihoods and the game had degenerated into a brawl, anyone still sober enough to see what was happening found himself on the floor shooting craps with Sam," writes McCamy.

But Sam always won, and as he pushed them, cursing, into the hallway, he spit on those who had lost the most and shoved into their pockets enough money for their families to live on until the next payday - when Sam would win it all over again.

"His black eyes would flash, his gold teeth would gleam and his hearty low-pitched laugh would echo through the hotel," McCamy writes.

McCamy, who worked at a general store and often sold Sam playing cards, claims Sam made himself a wealthy man, in fact "the only man in town who didn't have a charge account."

Sam continued to work in the area until 1957, when he retired and moved to Pennsylvania.

It is said that Sam always carried "a respectable knife" intended for his brother's murderer.

Writes McCamy: "If he ever encounters that man in this world, or the next, I don't want to be around."

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